Wireless communication systems have become an important means by which many people worldwide have come to communicate. A wireless communication system may provide communication for a plurality of wireless devices, each of which may be serviced through one or more access nodes of the communication system.
Nowadays, many wireless devices are designed to perform tasks beyond voice communications, such as internet browsing, calendar applications, email applications, navigation applications, and even user-generated applications. To perform these and other tasks, wireless devices require increased processing power and the capability to communicate wirelessly at increasingly higher rates. Increased processing power and increased wireless data rates generally increases power consumption of limited battery power.
Furthermore, some of the tasks that may be performed by the wireless device may consume more or less power than the others. Accordingly, a rate of power consumption of a device would vary depending on which of these tasks the wireless device is currently executing, and a conventional visual indicator may not provide the user an accurate measure of how much battery life remains in the device's battery (i.e., how much time remains before the battery can no longer support the device's operation).